“... an essay published in 1983, Tàpies made clear that he was not ‘much of a sculptor’, and this may have helped him to make the work in all its strangeness; he also wrote that he detested ‘the traditional material of sculpture, such as bronze and marble’. The monument is in a glass box, four metres by four, in a pool of water. Inside the box it seems ...”

“... undermine Musharraf, started inquiring about the many prisoners being held without charge. On 5 May 2007, it was told that Akhtar was not in government custody. His relatives insisted he was. Three weeks later, the government quietly released him and told the court, in the words of a National Crisis Management Cell report, that he was ‘engaged in jihadi ...”

“... worldwide conversion to fossil fuel, far from allowing whale populations to regenerate in peace, may be threatening them further by contributing to global warming. The population of the Antarctic minke whale is decreasing sharply because it depends on krill, which thrives at the edges of the big ice systems. As the circumference of the Southern ice-cap ...”

“... elsewhere, on another stage. The patient’s story is all we have, and Freud’s attention may float but it never wavers. His transcript is exhaustive – it includes a map (itself confused) of the patient’s wanderings – but also constrained: the analyst must ‘suppress his curiosity’ so as to allow tale and teller to create their telltale ...”

“... she lost weight, her eczema flared up, her mood dropped and her alopecia returned. In late May 2018, a month after her 21st birthday, she abandoned her appeal and shifted focus to the possibility of gaining early release with a home detention tag. But when her mother and brother visited Polmont on Sunday, 3 June, she was distraught. She told them there ...”

“... let us act as if we were/Dead already’; Woolf in 1936 summarised the personal mythology as ‘May, death, lads, Shropshire’; Orwell in 1940 listed ‘suicide, unhappy love, early death’; Forster in 1950 ticked off ‘the football and cherry trees, the poplars and glimmering weirs, the red coats, the darnel and the beer … the homesickness and ...”

“... here, as always, implies more than just a standard that is typical. What is not typical may be exceptional, and so better than it; but what is not ‘normal’ is infallibly worse than it – abnormal or subnormal. The call for Italy to become a normal country expresses a longing to resemble others who are superior to it. The full list of the ...”

“... vapours of the past. It is fastened by two rusty lockable latches, but there are no keys, so it may have to be prised open. I haven’t tried. It is very heavy and I loaded it into my car with difficulty. My mother, who was with me that day, was unusually quiet as I drove her home. She simply said: ‘If you open that suitcase you’ll never close it ...”

“... out) they are in operation.There are also two romances in play. The first is industrial: these may be the last merchant ships the Clyde ever builds and therefore ‘ane end o’ ane auld sang’ in the phrase used to describe the end of Scottish sovereignty in 1707. The second is Hebridean: the fifty inhabited islands that make their ragged pattern off the ...”

“... picture under there waiting to be revealed. What I’ve always said about life itself. We may scrape and spit and dab and rub, until the point when we declare that the truth stands plain before us ... Look no fly-shit! But it isn’t so! It’s just my word against everybody else’s. As in all Barnes’s books, wit and readability carry the day: the ...”

“... have been willing to believe the claims she makes for herself as a conviction politician: they may regard her political apprenticeship as irremediably narrow-minded and hard-faced, but they accept her account as essentially true. In the Grantham of the Thirties, however, reporter Anderson regarded the flaunting of such qualities as hard work, thrift and ...”

“... there were/are shorthand versions of the scripts which are no more difficult than Pittman. It may turn out to be the case that in the end the whole Chinese population will be persuaded to speak a single language, but this will be as a matter of administrative convenience rather than the technical difficulty of learning to write Chinese characters. I ...”

“... well have been Director-General in the old style. The relationship with the Board of Governors may now be easier. This Board itself, with its chairman in a position somewhere between that of a constitutional monarch and that of the President of the present French Republic, is also a relic of other times, as indeed is the notion of public service ...”

“... kiss and a lump of chocolate for Hugo for being able to walk. Please God he never has to march. May It’s all very green down here at the moment – lots of wild flowers and lots of your gumtrees with their barks hanging down like tattered lingerie. I saw a stork flying and heard a lark singing as though he were over Goodwood racecourse on that wonderful ...”